Znaimer maintains his claim to have invented term "zoomer"

Recently in the Globe and Mail wordmeister Warren Clements took issue in his March 8 column with Moses Znaimer's claim that he invented the term "zoomer", which he is using to rebrand CARP magazine.

Well, all good wishes to Znaimer, but he can't to have coined zoomer. In The Globe's pages alone, it has been around for years. Guy Dixon wrote in 2003 of a television commercial by advertising giant Young & Rubicam Inc. that "takes direct aim at the latest stage in baby boomer development - zoomer culture. These are boomers who feel half their age and want the world to know it." Two years earlier, The Sacramento Bee in California attributed the word "zoomers" to Del Webb, a developer of age-restricted communities for those 55 and over. In The Globe, Michael Kesterton's Social Studies quoted a brochure that defined a zoomer as "a no-limits baby boomer who sees retirement as the fast lane to a more energetic new life characterized by healthy living, a high level of physical activity, a quest for further learning, and who possesses technological and financial savvy." (The mangled syntax is sic.) In 2000, something called Promo magazine wrote that "aging Baby Boomers are turning into 'Zoomers,' yet another Boomer force to be reckoned with."

Znaimer replied on March 11:

I applied to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission for a channel that I called Zoomer in 2002. Since it takes approximately a year to create a CRTC application, and since I was speaking about the Zoomer idea internally for more than a year before that, I place my first use of the term at about 10 years ago. I came upon it by combining "Boomer with Zip" or, to be frank, "Znaimer with Boomer."

No ego there, then.